A missing woman who walked away from an Indiana bus stop at the age of 20 in 1962 has officially been found alive.
Audrey Backeberg, a wife and mother of two, was last seen by her family on July 7, 1962. She and her family’s babysitter hitchhiked from Reedsburg, Wisconsin, to Madison before taking a bus to Indianapolis.
The babysitter, unnamed in the missing person’s notice from the Sauk County Sheriff’s Department, said she last saw Ms. Backeberg walk around the corner away from the bus stop.
The case eventually went cold, but a SCSD detective reexamined the case this year and tracked down Ms. Backeberg, who was living out of state and away from home on her own volition, the department said in a release Thursday.
There were also allegations of abuse by her first husband prior to Ms. Backeberg’s decision to leave.
She reported before her disappearance that “her husband had loaded a couple of guns and put them into the trunk of his car and threatened to kill her,” former SCSD Sheriff Randy Stammen told the Baraboo News Republic in 2002, the 40th anniversary of her disappearance.
The detective on the case, Isaac Hanson, used Ms. Backeberg’s sister’s Ancestry.com account and moved from there.
“Ultimately, we came up with an address. … So I called the local sheriff’s department, said ’Hey, there’s this lady living at this address. Do you guys have somebody, you can just go pop in?’ … Ten minutes later, she called me, and we talked for 45 minutes,” Detective Hanson told Milwaukee’s WISN-TV.
He promised Ms. Backeberg, now 82 and remarried with a new identity, to keep the details of their discussion between them and to keep her current place of residence confidential.
“I think she just was removed and, you know, moved on from things and kind of did her own thing and led her life. She sounded happy. Confident in her decision. No regrets,” Detective Hanson said.
Her family, meanwhile, is “elated” to hear that she wasn’t murdered as it feared, he told The Chippewa Herald.
